


Fingertips

by akaparalian



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Fuck Or Die, M/M, Shenanigans, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:08:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21858742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: Alec finds himself on the wrong end of a probably well-meant but very inappropriate spell while trying to contain some Seelie revelry. Magnus helps.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 4
Kudos: 152
Collections: The Malec Secret Santa - Edition 2019





	Fingertips

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ohfreckle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohfreckle/gifts).

> Happy holidays, ohfreckle! I hope you enjoy! <3

In hindsight, Alec should probably have known better than to bother trying to patrol on the Solstice. It's a holdover from his parents' era, when relations with the Downworld were much more tense, as well as a mark of a generally suspicious mindset that he's trying very hard to move the Institute away from. Yes, the Seelies get up to all kinds of nonsense on the Solstice; yes, there will probably be a few confused Mundanes talking about the odd goings-on in Central Park the next day, and all of Manhattan will smell like juniper and sage for the next _week_ if it's anything like it has been the past few years, but there never actually seem to be any serious problems that the Seelies aren't perfectly capable of dealing with amongst themselves. It's a night of revelry, of spectacle, but it's not usually a night of _mischief. _Hell, the wolves usually get up to _way_ more trouble on New Year's Eve, and he doesn't bother trying to keep an eye on _them. _The whole thing with the Seelies and the Solstice, the level of inherent suspicion that he still finds himself unlearning — it's ridiculous. It's archaic. It's pointless.

It's never bitten him in the ass _this _badly before, though.

"You're going to be fine," Magnus reassures him, his hands glowing as he runs them over Alec's neck and shoulders, trying to diagnose whatever the hell it is the Seelie knight Alec had stopped from drunkenly trying to bring the Balto statue to life had then hit him with. He's kneeling on the floor, between Alec's legs; Alec is perched on the edge of the couch, still in his patrol gear, mostly, and trying very hard not to get city grime and miscellaneous splashes of Seelie-related mess all over the furniture. "I can already tell that much. This doesn't feel malicious at all." 

Ostensibly, he's conducting a thorough and careful inspection, to make sure Alec isn't about to start growing extra limbs, walking through walls, glowing in the dark, or Raziel only knows what else. He mostly seems amused, though, at the fact that whatever the spell had been, it had also involved getting Alec absolutely _covered_ in glitter — though that may actually have just been a side effect of trying to physically restrain the Seelie in question.

"I know," Alec grumbles, fighting the urge to pout. Really, he's not sure what he's got to complain about; "I need to go find Magnus and make sure whatever this was isn't going to kill me, since the guy who did it isn't coherent enough to reliably tell me himself" had proven to be an absolutely flawless excuse to call off his patrol early, and it's not like he's upset about getting home sooner than he'd thought he would and therefore getting to spend that much extra time with Magnus. It just feels slightly less than dignified to have to be inspected for the side effects of drunken Seelie magic like he’s fresh out of the Shadowhunter Academy, that's all. Plus, the glitter is _itchy_, and he can feel it all over him, a fine, gritty, uncomfortable layer. It's making him feel hot, and he shifts slightly, trying to get comfortable.

"I'm beginning to doubt that he really did anything to you at all, actually," Magnus muses, running his hands over Alec's abdomen now. "That is, he certainly blasted you with magic, but I'm not sure it actually had any effect. He may have thought you were also a Seelie, and tried to do something that doesn't actually work on mortals, or..." He trails off, a little crease appearing in his brow, and Alec looks down to see that while his hands have stilled, the magic around them seems to be pulsing. "No, all right, there's definitely _something._"

Alec shoves his sleeves up to his elbows, idly scratching at his forearms. The longer he sits here, the hotter and itchier and less comfortable he seems to feel, which is a little strange; one of the wonderful things about living with the High Warlock of Brooklyn is that the climate control is always perfect. The loft keeps itself perfectly adjusted to the preferences of its inhabitants, except right now, Alec can feel sweat starting to gather at the small of his back. He frowns.

"There's something, all right," he says. "I feel..."

Magnus glances up at him and must find something alarming in his face, because he immediately lowers his hands, the glow of his magic fading away. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know," Alec says at first, then changes his mind. "It's hot. I feel —"

But he finds that he can’t get out the rest of the sentence. It's as if he can't quite focus, his thoughts wanting to do anything possible except go in a straight line. He grimaces slightly, and then frowns more deeply when Magnus' hands come up to cup his face, one thumb brushing over his cheekbones. Magnus' touch is cooling, but almost uncomfortably so, the feeling like a shock to his system. 

"You don't feel hot to me," Magnus says, half to himself, "so the effect isn't physical, whatever it is — though of course that doesn't mean it can't be physically damaging... Do you feel anything else? Dizzy? Numb?"

"Not numb," Alec says. On the contrary, there's a bit of a tingling sensation in his extremities, now that he stops to think about it. "Itchy, though — can you get right of the damn glitter?"

Magnus nods, then snaps. There's a beat, and then he frowns and snaps again. He doesn't bother doing it a third time, though he does reach out to try and physically brush the glitter away, which isn't any more effective than trying to remove it with magic had been. 

"Ah," he says. Then, suddenly, his eyes narrow. "You said you felt hot? Itchy? Are you confused — are you having trouble focusing?"

"Yes," Alec says. "I’m — do you know what it is, then?"

"I might," Magnus mutters, his hands glowing blue with magic again. "I think I was looking in the wrong — ah."

Alec shifts, squints, shivers a little. "Ah?"

Not meeting his eyes, Magnus curses, his hands flaring even more brightly blue as he sweeps them in broad strokes all around Alec's body. "It may not have been malicious, but it _is_ dangerous," he says. "I was right, too, when I said he must have mistaken you for another Seelie — but I was wrong in saying that that must have made the magic less effective. It did the opposite."

"It's worse?" Alec says. "It — made it worse?"

"Yes," Magnus says tightly, and then all at once the magic seems to burst outward from his hands and sweep through Alec's entire body, every cell lighting up with the bite of cold, where normally Magnus' magic feels quite warm to him. "Oh, damn it, sometimes I hate being right."

"Magnus, please just tell me what's wrong," Alec begs, squeezing his eyes shut tight for a moment. "I need to — should I go back to the Institute? Should I go try to track down the Seelie? What's _wrong?"_

"Nothing will be wrong if we handle this quickly," Magnus says. "Luckily, I think we've caught it in plenty of time — it's a good thing you came straight here. But it is a bit of a nasty piece of work, so we have to take it seriously. I hate messing with Seelie magic," he mutters as an aside, wrinkly his nose. "So messy."

"_Magnus._"

"Sorry," Magnus says, exhaling sharply through his nose. "It's just a little — well. To put it bluntly, Alexander, it's a sex spell."

"Oh," Alec says, a little blankly. Then, slowly, the thought filters through his mind properly, and he starts to get mad. "It — so he _roofied_ me?"

"That's one way to look at it, yes," Magnus says, squeezing his eyes shut tight for a moment and pinching the bridge of his nose. He's clearly frustrated, but strangely, Alec feels remarkably calmer now that he knows that — however unintentionally — a Seelie sprayed him with sex glitter. It makes everything make just a little bit more sense, from the way his skin still feels hot and stretched thin over his frame to the way he feels his eyes going a little heavy-lidded. And it _definitely_ explains the way his throat goes dry when he looks at Magnus, though that one's not exactly out of the ordinary.

"Is it going to wear off?" Alec asks, his voice slurring slightly. The longer he sits here, the more intense everything seems to feel, and either he's crazy, or it's accelerating, each passing moment speeding faster and faster towards — something. He doesn’t quite know what, but given the nature of the spell, he can obviously guess. 

Magnus frowns again, but opens his eyes, his hands dropping to move in slow, sweeping arcs around Alec's body once again. "It should," he says a little dubiously, and then immediately swears again. "Unless all the ways you're different from a Seelie mean that the effects won't fade like they should."

Alec frowns. That, obviously, does not sound good. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I can’t really be certain," Magnus says, but his tone is grim enough that Alec knows the caveat probably isn't worth much. "But if I'm understanding the impact this is having on you correctly, it's not going to just — _go away _the way it should. For a Seelie, this is just a harmless little party drug. But Seelie drugs are complicated; angel blood and demon blood combined allows for some complex physiological effects. But you, Alexander—" He laughs, short and sharp. "You only have half the puzzle pieces. You don't have demon blood, so instead of fading in a couple of hours, we can either give the magic what it wants, or..."

He doesn't say exactly what, but the way he trails off is more than enough. Alec doesn't exactly like to talk about the possibility of Magnus being hurt or dying, either; he more than understands not actually wanting to say the words.

"Well—" he says, trying to keep his own voice relatively even. "Well, then what does it — what does it want? What do we need to give it?"

Magnus grimaces a little. "It's a sex spell, remember?"

"Oh!" Alec replies, taken aback. The relief is so immediate and overwhelming that he doesn't even stop to think, at first, about why Magnus would still sound so upset if the solution is that simple. "Oh, well then that's — that's easy, isn't it?"

"Easy," Magnus says. He sounds _bitter_, Alec realizes with shock, and unhappy, and clearly Alec is missing something very key, here, because he can't fathom what it is that would suddenly make the idea of having sex with him make Magnus sound like _that._ His immediate thought is that he must have done something wrong, and anxiety snakes through him in an instant, but — Magnus hasn't moved away from him, hasn't tried to put any distance between them. He has to try and keep himself from jumping to conclusions, has to —

"Do you not want to?" he blurts, and then immediately winces, even before he has a chance to take in Magnus' look of blank shock.

There's a moment of silence before either of them manages to say anything after that, and then when Magnus does manage to say something, his voice actually cracks on his surprise.

"What — Alec, it's not about whether _I_ want to," he says, very much with the air of someone who has been shocked into blunt honesty. "I'm not the one who's being held at metaphorical gunpoint. The problem is whether or not _you_ want to — or not even that, it's whether or not you have the option of saying no, even if you do want to."

Another pause, as Alec's mouth drops open and he tries for several long seconds to formulate an answer that's even slightly intelligible. "But it's _you_," he says eventually. He feels a little stupid saying it, and his voice is bewildered even to his own ears. "I mean — _how_ long have we been having sex? Why is this different?"

"Because you don't have the _ability_ to say no!" Magnus says, his voice close to boiling over with a potent mixture of worry and frustration. "Whether or not you _would _doesn't matter in this case as much as the fact that you _can't_. I know that you _wouldn't_. I believe you. But I don't like that you _couldn't._ I don’t like that some — some Seelie whose name I’ll never know took that away from you, however unintentionally._"_

Alec frowns a little, squints at the intense, unreadable look on Magnus' face, and reaches over a little hesitantly to clasp his hand. "Look," he says, keeping his voice as level and clear as possible, though his mind feels anything but. "I'm not sure I can really have this conversation right now. I mean, I'm — it's all a little—" He gestures wildly with the hand that's not holding Magnus', trying his best to convey the way it feels like he's trying to think through syrup, slow and sticky and sweet. "But I — I understand that you're not huge on the circumstances. I'm pretty sure I understand why? But maybe we can... you know, when I'm less..."

He gestures again, and Magnus reaches up to snatch his hand out of the air before he can get very animated. 

"'I'm too impaired to even have this conversation, so we should just go ahead and have sex and talk about it later' is not the watertight argument you probably think it is," he says dryly. Then he sighs, slow and audibly frustrated, and squeezes both of Alec's hands where he's brought them to settle in his lap. "But, unfortunately, in this situation, I think you might be right. It's not like I can just sit around a few hours and wait for you to sober up..." 

Magnus still doesn't sound entirely comfortable, so Alec tries his best to be cautious and respectful when he leans in to kiss him, just a gentle brush of lips. "I'm sorry," he says, the thought clearer and more sobering than any he's had in a while. "I don't want to put you in a position like this."

"It's all right, Alexander," Magnus says softly, squeezing his hands again. "It's not as though it’s your fault, and... well, to your own point, it's not as though this isn't how the night would have ended anyway, more likely than not. We just have a few additional wrinkles to work through with the situation that we weren't expecting."

"Right," Alec breathes. "Wrinkles." 

When he leans in to kiss Magnus again, it's significantly less cautious, though he does still pull away after just a few seconds, not really giving Magnus an opportunity to respond in kind. He leans back just enough to tempt Magnus forward, and the gambit works: Magnus shifts from being on his knees on the floor to crawling up into Alec's lap with sinuous grace, his eyes glittering. By the time he's got one knee on either side of Alec's hips, Alec is breathing hard, his chest heaving at nothing more than the teasing press of Magnus' legs through the double layer of their pants and the slight, reluctant quirk of his mouth. 

"Magnus," he says, or rather, croaks; his chest feels tight, his heart pounding in his throat. Magnus smiles at him with only a hint of reluctance remaining, arms wrapping around him, hands scratching and catching in the hair at the nape of his neck.

"I'm sure it's starting to get a little uncomfortable for you," he murmurs, his eyes flickering down from Alec's eyes to his lips to the hollow of his throat. "Seelie drugs are just as dangerous for me as they are for you — you don't have demon blood, I don't have angel blood... So I don't have any personal experience, but I've certainly known those who were more than willing to take the risk. I've heard stories."

For all that he's on edge and humming with arousal, Alec hasn't actually taken much time, to this point, to realize the impact of the drug on him physically, other than how hot and sensitive he still feels. It takes only one brief, gentle roll of Magnus' hips, though, for him to realize that those lesser sensations have just been there to distract him. Magnus presses their cocks together, even through multiple layers of fabric, and Alec gasps out loud, the sound shockingly sudden and inescapable in the otherwise-quiet loft. 

"That's what I thought," Magnus hums, his eyes crinkling slightly at the corners. Then, without any sort of warning, he ducks down to nip at Alec's jaw, his earlobe, his throat, trailing little kisses and bites inexorably downward until he finally reaches the point where Alec's neck connects with his shoulder. There, he bites down with significantly more force, licks over the bite with warm, wet flashes of tongue, and then sucks, just hard enough to really entice but not quite hard enough to satisfy the pulsing need that's settling low in Alec's abdomen.

"_Raziel," _he hisses under his breath, his hands fluttering uselessly up and down Magnus' sides. Magnus bites him again, and he curses even louder, his voice breaking in the middle of the word: "_Fuck_. Magnus, I don't know if I can—"

"No teasing tonight?" Magnus says, pulling back just far enough to look Alec in the eyes again. He takes the opportunity offered by this slightly greater distance to start working at Alec's clothes, pushing his jacket down off his shoulders and slipping his arms from the sleeves, and then working his hands up under the t-shirt underneath until he can strip it quickly off over Alec's head. "Now that's a crying shame."

"Tease me on nights when it doesn't have life-or-death consequences," Alec breathes, just before pulling Magnus toward him by looping his arms around his neck and kissing him soundly, nipping at his lower lip in retaliation for the bruise that will no doubt bloom under his collar by the morning. 

"Oh, you're not _that_ close to the edge, I think," Magnus says as they pull apart. His voice is still even, but his breathing is certainly not, Alec notes with satisfaction; he starts working on his own shirt as he talks, though his eyes never leave Alec. "You've got several hours yet before you'd _really_ start to feel the ill effects, and even then you'd have a few hours more before it got truly dangerous."

"I’m not so sure about taking that chance," Alec replies, reaching out to help him with the buttons down the front of his silky blue top. “Better safe than sorry.”

Magnus hums dismissively, but he flings his shirt aside to join Alec’s and then places his hands just over Alec’s ribs, starting a steady trail downwards that’s totally counter to the aloofness he’s trying to portray. He fingers the button on Alec’s jeans, gaze flicking up so that their eyes lock, and then he pauses a moment, his hands stiling again.

“You’re sure?” he says, quietly. His eyes flicker over Alec’s face.

“Of course I’m sure,” Alec replies, feeling almost unbearably fond. He feels like the sentiment might need a little proof, though — just in case — so he leans down, catching Magnus’ face between his hands and kissing him and kissing him until absolutely every thought has gone out of his own head. When he surfaces again, his pants are gone, or at least shoved far enough down his thighs that they’re out of the way, and Magnus has one hand curled loosely around the base of his cock.

Alec makes an almost wounded little noise when Magnus’ hand flexes, his grip tightening almost imperceptibly and then loosening again. Magnus responds with his own wordless noise: a considering hum accompanied by another little squeeze.

“You really are feeling it, though, aren’t you?” he asks, his tone wondering. Alec doesn’t bother answering, or even nodding; he just keens a little, presses his hips up into Magnus’ touch, and throws his head back, his eyes fluttering shut.

It’s over remarkably quickly after that — perhaps unsurprising, given how worked up Alec is, how hot and close and sensitive everything feels. Magnus barely gets a few good strokes in before Alec is choking on his own breath, his whole body gone taut with need; if not for the chemical influence, the amount of time it takes for him to double over, pressing his face into the crook of Magnus’ neck, and come all over his hands would be positively embarrassing.

There’s a long pause in the aftermath, the silence broken only by their heavy breathing. Alec’s eyes are almost entirely shut, so he feels more than sees the familiar little flicking motion that Magnus uses to get rid of the come, but his eyes struggle open when Magnus says “Oh!”, a soft sound of surprise. When Alec looks down, he sees the Seelie glitter fading off of his skin, disappearing in patches until, in mere moments, it’s as though it was never even there at all.

“Well,” he says after a moment, turning his arm this way and that to make sure that all of the glitter is truly gone. “That was easy, after all that.”

Magnus hums an assent, grabbing Alec’s other hand to flip it around and run his fingers over it himself, likewise checking for any remaining traces of glitter and, based on the way he nods and then squeezes Alec’s hand in his own, finding none. “I’m still not exactly thrilled that you got blasted by Seelie sex magic without your consent, but… yes. It certainly seems to be gone now.”

Alec smiles at him, leaning down for a light peck on the lips. “It wasn’t exactly how I was expecting my night to go, but it also didn’t turn out to be the end of the world,” he says, squeezing Magnus’ hand right back. “I love you. I knew you’d figure out what it was, and figure out how to fix it. I trusted you. And, hey — it worked out pretty well, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I guess you did get your happy ending.”

“Mmm,” Alec agrees, then narrows his eyes a little, his voice dropping into a slightly lower register. “And the night’s not exactly over yet.”

“Alexander,” Magnus replies, dropping Alec’s hand so that he can link his arms behind Alec’s neck instead, his eyes glittering. “Whatever could you mean?”

“Let’s go to bed,” Alec murmurs. “No offense to the Seelies, but I don’t really need anything extra for a night with you.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Magnus replies, and as Magnus draws him up and towards the bedroom, Alec finds it’s easy enough to forget the hot, itchy feeling of glitter on his skin and replace it with the feeling of Magnus’ touch instead.


End file.
